On Wine, Taste, Teeth and Prejudice
Consider this:
"It has been clearly demonstrated that the colour of a wine has the greatest influence on our tasting of a glass of wine"
Now, this:
"until more work is been done on the impact of other prejudices we cannot know if other elements will also affect the way we taste to a greater or lesser degree than colour."
This is Fabian Cobb’s final thoughts in a brilliant, but esoteric, post over at Fine Wine Press on the most current information we have on how our senses, and particularly the sense of taste, affects our perception of a wine.
It’s interesting that color is the most important consistent influence on how our brains will perceive the taste of wine. This is pretty basic information, yet it has a huge influence on our reception of a wine.
So consider the wine geek, someone whose intellectual proximity to wine is far more intimate than your average person. Imagine the prejudices I and you readers bring to a glass of wine. I wonder how all this information in our head will affect our sensory perception of the wine.
The most brutal speculation we might make is that Chateau Latour only seems to taste so great to us because it’s "suppose" to taste great to us. Along the same lines, does our appreciation of a well made wine glass affect how we perceive the wine it holds? And then of course there’s the impact of tasting a wine as you read that it was rated 97 points?
Read Mr. Cobb’s article. The section on the taste receptors of the teeth alone is worth the effort.
well, tom, how seriously can we take fabian cobb’s assertion that “it has been clearly demonstrated that the colour of the wine has the greatest influence on our tasting of a glass of wine,” when he presents no documentation or reference to support this “clear demonstration”? and he makes this assertion at the end of the last paragraph of this report on taste sensation from the tongue and teeth. certainly color is important — this is red wine, this is white wine — as we see in tastings that are truly blind, that is with participants blondfolded or tasting from black glasses; but to say that it is more important than the olfactory elements seems to overstate the case. the most interesting parts of his post are the debunking of the old “tongue-map” and the mention of the influence of the teeth and dental-work on taste. all that metal in our American mouths must do something…..
Metal Teeth
250 File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat contralateral teeth without metal posls by